2024 AOSSM Annual Meeting Dean C. Taylor,MD,Presidential Address

Wow! That was fun! Thanks, Mark [Miller], for all the nice things you said. Your introduction and walking up here with all our past presidents who are sports medicine legends and my heroes— that was awesome!

Sports medicine is awesome! And what we do in leading sports medicine is awesome! In fact, isn’t that what AOSSM is? Leading sports medicine is AOSSM. With a nod to Mark Miller and his phonetic pronunciation of AOSSM, leading sports medicine is awesome.

Today, I am going to talk about leadership and outline how AOSSM is leading sports medicine. I started my own leadership education 47 years ago when they shaved all my hair off on my first day at West Point. Over the next 28 years in the US Army, I learned a lot about leadership.

When I arrived back at Duke University in 2006, we had an opportunity to innovate in sports medicine education. I had just read Jim Collins book Good to Great. In his work, Collins discovered that great companies figured out what they could do better than anyone else and tenaciously stuck to that expertise, what he called the “hedgehog principle.”

I had an idea. I realized that at Duke we could do something better than anyone else: incorporate leadership education into our fellowship. Over the last 18 years, we have done just that and have also expanded leadership education across the medical school, health system, and university.

The incubator and catalyst for much of this leadership education is the Feagin Leadership Program. In 2009, we assembled a diverse group of leaders as we honored John Feagin in the first Feagin Leadership Forum. This May we held our 15th Feagin Forum, “Leading in a Polarized World.” World-class speakers shared impactful insights, and attendees better realized that to lead in today’s world, you need to:

• Work thoughtfully to build relationships,

• Listen with curiosity to understand, and

• Seek to find common ground from which to build.

More on this later.

In addition to the forum, the other component of the Feagin Leadership Program is the Scholars Program. Each year, we select a cohort of 30 scholars from a diverse pool of applicants. Their growth over the 9-month program is phenomenal, and they shine when they present their work at the forum each May. In addition to their personal growth, the scholars have contributed to health care leadership in numerous ways. I’ll share just a few.

A scholars team created a proposal for a leadership program for the entire Duke School of Medicine, which was adopted and is now in its 10th year. Another team published a book that shared stories about what patients want in their medical care, and several teams conducted the research that filled a void and created a health care leadership model where previously none existed.

We have used many of the lessons learned from the Feagin program this year leading sports medicine. Let’s highlight some examples, beginning with something from the leadership model: teamwork.

Leading sports medicine is a team effort. All of us work in teams. I am grateful for all of you as teammates in leading sports medicine. Since I have the stage, and gratitude is the emotion that I am feeling most today, I am going to take some time to say “thank you” to many of our teammates. A warning: I have way too many people to thank, so you will see a lot of photos. If you look hard, you likely will see yourself!

First, the AOSSM presidential line. Kurt Spindler, Mark Miller, Chris Kaeding, and Eric McCarty, you are exceptional teammates. Thank you.

Thank you to all the AOSSM past presidents. Your example and support have been priceless. Thank you, board of directors and Medical Publishing Group Board. Your tireless efforts make the AOSSM better for all of us. Thanks to our incredible professional team, led by Greg Dummer and Christina Tomaso, and all that you do to carry out the vision of our presidential line and board of directors.

A special thank you to the program committee team, led by Alison Toth and Jonathan Dickens, frequently in the background but never wavering in their dedication to making this annual meeting and specialty day the most fabulous programs possible. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for Alison and Jon.

I also want to express my gratitude to all of you. We form an amazing team as, collectively, all of us are working together to lead sports medicine. And while I am at it, I want to express my appreciation for the many of my other teammates who have supported me this year and throughout my career.

I am incredibly grateful for all the exemplary military leaders who showed me how to take care of patients and be a patient-centered leader. This began with my first mentors in medicine and orthopaedics, Walt Curl and Rick Wilkerson, and continued with my fellowship directors, Jack Ryan and Bob Arciero, my incredible practice partners, and too many others to name who influenced our lives for the better. Thank you.

A special thanks to our sports medicine fellows, both at West Point and Duke. You taught us as much as we taught you.

Over the last 18 years, I have been blessed to be part of an awesome team of teams at Duke, from our clinic and operating room teams to our sports medicine teams. Thank you.

Thank you to my exceptional faculty teammates, led by my orthopaedic brother and this year’s Rovere Award winner, Annunziato (Ned) Amendola, and mentors, like John Feagin, Frank Bassett, Leonard Goldner, Bill Garrett, Jim Urbaniak, and many others. And of course, our Feagin and LEAD education teams, particularly Stacey Herrera.

I especially want to mention two teammates who are here today as my guests. Our Feagin Leadership Program executive director, Joe Doty, and the head of our clinical team, physician’s assistant extraordinaire Scott Gibson. Joe and Scott, thanks for all that you do for our patients and for better leadership in medicine.

I am also immeasurably grateful for the support of my home team, my family. Those that can’t be here, like my 91-year-old mom Dorothy, and my brother Dwayne and his family in Michigan; my sister Diane, who passed away in 2020; and my brother-in-law Dennis Lisk, who is in California.

I am also grateful for those who are here: my sister Donna and her husband, Mike Corcel, who live here in Fairplay, Colorado. Thank you both for your positive energy and love.

My daughter Kate is a nationally acclaimed journalist and documentarian. She is the most famous person in our family. Kate, I am grateful for your brilliance, loyalty, and love. I am thrilled that my son Ben and his wife, April, are here, taking time away from their busy worlds of tackling the challenges of addiction disorders and negotiating the ever-changing world at Google, respectively. Thank you both for your remarkable intelligence, your support, and your love.

You know, sometimes the responsibility of leading can be overwhelming. One way to keep it from becoming overwhelming is to share the responsibility with other partners. I am fortunate to have the best partner in the world, an awesome leader in her own right, to share the responsibilities of leading. Ann, you have put up with me for a long time. Thank you for sticking with me. You are a remarkable partner, mother, leader. You are a most amazing person. I love you.

As I said, leading is hard. Sports medicine can be hard: tough cases, board certification, continuing education, liability risk, challenging clinical problems, on and on and on, including the emergency care of athletes on the field. If it’s so hard, why do we put up with it, and how can I say that leading sports medicine is awesome?

Well, Tom Hanks, in his brilliance, has the answer for us. Many of you know the movie A League of Their Own, and many of you know the line “There is no crying in baseball.” Well, my good friend and another sports medicine brother Bob Arciero is adamant that “no crying in baseball” is not the best line from A League of Their Own.

He says, and I wholeheartedly agree, that the best line is when Gina Davis is leaving the team and she says, “It just got too hard.” Tom Hanks’ response is classic: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great!”

Even so, we can only take so much hard. Some of the hard isn’t just hard; it is ridiculous. To make the “good hard” great and eliminate the ridiculous this year, AOSSM focused on leading in four areas:

• Leading Collaboratively,

• Leading Discovery,

• Leading Learning, and

• Leading for the Future.

What I would like to do for the next 2 hours is share how we are leading. Just kidding! That would be ridiculous.

I’m not going to share every single awesome thing that is going on with the AOSSM. There are just too many to describe. What I am going to do is talk about how our focus on leadership has led to some impactful initiatives, programs, and accomplishments—some real wows!

Collectively and collaboratively, we are leading sports medicine. We do so collaboratively with other organizations in North America and across the world. We are better together with our industry partners. Our collective work continues to push sports medicine forward.

There is no better example of leading collaboratively than the AOSSM Traveling Fellows program. In 1985, John Feagin and Werner Mueller—the exemplars of selfless, collaborative leadership—sat in a corner of the Walliser Kanne restaurant in Basel, Switzerland, and sketched out the plans for an AOSSM/ESSKA [European Society of Sports Traumatology, Knee Surgery & Arthroscopy] sports medicine traveling fellowship program on the back of a napkin. Although the napkin has been lost, the traveling fellowship program continues to flourish.

Almost 40 years later, and now expanded to include APKASS [Asia-Pacific Knee, Arthroscopy and Sports Medicine Society] and SLARD [Sociedad Latinoamericana de Artroscopía, Reconstrucción articular y trauma Deportivo], the program continues to provide an incomparable networking experience and educational exchange for sports medicine leaders throughout the world.

As a 1993 AOSSM traveling fellow to Asia and the Western Pacific, I found the traveling fellowship to be a life-changing experience. We met and learned from orthopaedic sports medicine leaders from across the Pacific. They and their teams, along with my co-traveling fellows, Carol Teitz, David Martin, and our “godfather” Frank Bassett, influenced me to find a way to continue this magical collaborative experience beyond our tour.

During a break in our travels, on a beach in Bali, I had another “light bulb moment” to create an alumni association of the sports medicine traveling fellows. Our group and other alumni from the traveling fellowships, including Nik Friederich and several others who are here today, established the Magellan Society, the alumni society for the traveling fellows. We held our first meeting in Stockholm and Helsinki in 1995.

Now, almost 30 years later, we welcome the latest traveling fellows to Denver. APKASS traveling fellows Zhao, Tim, Kanto, and Michael, welcome to the AOSSM annual meeting and welcome to the Magellan Society.

I said I would share some wow moments. Well, here’s one: one of the traveling fellowship founders and one of the Magellan Society co-founders have honored us by traveling all the way from Basel, Switzerland. Werner Mueller and Nik Friederich, could you please stand? Gentlemen, thank you for your collaborative leadership.

Let’s also celebrate a major award recognizing our collaborative leadership. AOSSM received the 2024 Most Valuable Partner Society Award at the ESSKA annual meeting in Milan. It was an honor to accept this award on behalf of all of you, our AOSSM team.

For a closer-to-home example of collaborative leadership, look at this annual meeting. We have exchange lectures with faculty from many societies, designed sessions with our partners, and featured numerous research and educational collaborations.

A great example of such collaboration was yesterday’s game changer session, “The Unequal Playing Field,” organized in partnership with the J. Robert Gladden Orthopaedic Society (JRGOS). Special guest Billy McMullin and the JRGOS/AOSSM team focused on the very real, very negative impact of racial disparities in health care, and moved forward our understanding of how to make the playing field more equal.

There are many more incredible ongoing collaborations. I am going to highlight one that is particularly close to my heart: our work and collaboration with the Arthroscopic Association of North America (AANA).

Many of you may be of the opinion that the AANA/AOSSM relationship has been somewhat polarized over the last 42 years, and I agree. That said, together over the last year we have followed those Feagin Forum lessons learned I mentioned earlier to become less polarized and more aligned.

We have built on existing relationships with the AANA presidential line. We have listened to each other to understand. And we have found common ground; our similarities are overwhelmingly greater than our differences. Together, we collaborated on several initiatives.

Both organizations have agreed that sports medicine fellowship education is a shared responsibility. We agree that AOSSM will lead communications and administration of the fellowships, and we agree arthroscopy is important to all our fellows. As a result, we will now issue one combined AOSSM/AANA fellowship graduation certificate. These certificates will recognize graduates as completing sports medicine and arthroscopy fellowships.

We have formed task forces to look at how we can better conduct arthroscopic surgical skills education and assessment, and examine how we can organizationally and financially work better together.

AOSSM and AANA strongly believe that we are better together in many ways. I have the privilege of announcing that our presidential lines have agreed that beginning in 2026, we will partner on specialty day every year at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) annual meeting.

This collaboration with AANA has been a highlight to my year as president. We are exceptionally grateful for the AANA leadership team’s efforts, and today I want to recognize two members of their presidential line who are here with us, John Tokish and John Kelly. Could you please stand? Let’s all thank them for leading collaboratively with us! This is awesome!

I have been focusing extensively on leading collaboratively, but all our leadership initiatives blend together and complement each other. There is no better example than the Military Advanced Surgical Treatment (MAST) Research Initiative, through which AOSSM, AANA, and the Society of Military Orthopaedic Surgeons are collaboratively leading discovery.

The first MAST research grant was awarded to Andrew Sheean at the inaugural MAST summit in November. Congratulations to you and your team, Andy. The grant submissions were extraordinary—so much so that we have another hot-off-the press announcement. AAOS has joined our partnership, and we have awarded a second MAST grant from last year’s submissions. Congratulations to Patrick Mescher and his team!

I also want to announce another new collaborative effort to lead discovery, the Return to Play Grant. I am proud to announce the winner of a new $200,000 research grant focused on return-to-play issues in partnership with JRGOS, The FORUM, The Aircast Foundation, and Arthrex. The winner of the inaugural Return to Play Grant is Christian Lattermann!

As we’re talking about complementary initiatives, think of all we are doing at this annual meeting to blend collaboration, discovery, and learning. It is amazing to host our annual meeting in Denver. It brings my career full circle. My life as physician began in Denver as a general surgery intern at Fitzsimons Army Medical Center. Take a look at this photo of Fitzsimons, which is now the administrative building, Building 500, at the University of Colorado Medical Center. You can hardly see it among the subsequent development.

Returning to Denver is just a small example of how awesome this experience has been and will continue to be this week. We are leading discovery with the most innovative, in-depth research, selecting from a record 922 phenomenal abstracts for our scientific program. The education provided by our experts, researchers, and industry partners is second to none.

We are leading learning, in the learning of both technical skills and nontechnical, interpersonal leadership skills. These so-called “soft skills” are actually the hardest to learn. At this annual meeting, our programming is teaching those interpersonal skills, because as Tom Hanks says, “The hard is what makes it great.”

At this meeting, in addition to the exceptional technical educational programs, we are focused on programming that is patient-centered, founded on integrity and service, and designed to enhance critical thinking, teamwork, and emotional intelligence skills. Here are some examples.

I already mentioned yesterday’s game changer session with the Gladden Society. Tomorrow, I look forward to introducing you to my West Point classmate, and retired four-star general, Bob Brown. Bob was an incredible basketball player under Mike Krzyzewski at West Point, and then became a regular in our operating rooms as a patient. General Brown is currently serving as the CEO of the Association of the United States Army and its more than 1.3 million members. I encourage you all to come and learn from one of the world’s great leaders.

Tomorrow, you will also have the chance to hear from two elite athletes. First, presidential guest speaker Tiki Barber will team up with the New York Giants medical team leaders, Scott Rodeo and Ronnie Barnes, and moderator Alison Toth. Personally, I am thrilled for this session because it highlights Wilson, North Carolina native and amazing human being Ronnie Barnes; because it will also show off Alison Toth’s exquisite skill at poking these Giants both to make you laugh and to bring out their pearls of wisdom; and because it is truly a team approach.

You’ll also learn from Nina O’Brien, a world champion alpine skier who sustained a horrendous injury on the slopes at the Beijing Olympics. She teams up with her surgeon, Tom Hackett, and the chief medical officer of the US Olympic and Paralympic team, Jon Finnoff. I can’t wait to learn from their insights. While the annual meeting is our most obvious example of leading learning, there are many others. AOSSM’s Hockey Summit in partnership with the National Hockey League and chaired by three Stanley Cup playoff team physicians will focus on current issues like the rise of women’s hockey, holistic care for youth athletes, and DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] in the world’s greatest sport. You won’t want to miss it.

The upcoming surgical skills course, Global Innovations in Complex Shoulder Surgery, is another exciting example of collaboratively leading learning. Partnering with the OLC Education & Conference Center, the Asociación Mexicana de Cirugía Reconstructiva Articular y Artroscópica (AMECRA), and SLARD, this innovative, multilingual course is a phenomenal team effort, including live surgical demonstrations from Rosemont, Mexico, and Colombia.

More breaking news: in December, AOSSM is launching a state-of-the-art, virtual, integrated, modular Team Physician Series. You can learn more at sportsmed.org/events. Keep an eye on your inbox for more information on this innovative new course.

I would be remiss to leave the AOSSM’s publishing arm out of this discussion on collaboratively leading learning and discovery. Through four exceptional peer-reviewed journals, the society is at the forefront of delivering sports medicine science and education to the world. Our publishing teams are working together to ensure our society maintains its well-deserved reputation of leading the dissemination of sports medicine research and education.

AOSSM publishing has thrived under the leadership of the incomparable Bruce Reider. Chris Kaeding’s tribute to Bruce as the Leach Award Winner outlined his many accomplishments and contributions to the AOSSM. Please allow me to add my own personal congratulations. Bruce, you have been an incredible leader in AOSSM from your role in the first group of traveling fellows to your contributions as a tremendous researcher, educator, and brilliant editor for our journals.

More than these, you and Trish have been wonderful friends to Ann and me. Thank you again for all that you have done for AOSSM and for all of sports medicine. Let’s hear it again for Bruce Reider!

The best news is, in the words of Bob Marley, “Everything is gonna be all right.” Bruce is not leaving. He is continuing to serve as editor-in-chief of the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine and will continue to host his brilliant series of podcasts, Easy Reider. The future of our awesome publishing looks awesome!

Speaking of the future, I am excited about how our Leading for the Future initiative complements the other three. We are leading for the future with perhaps the most impactful program I am going to mention today, the Boosting Orthopaedic Leaders’ Development (BOLD) Program.

Building from Michael Ciccotti’s emerging leaders initiative, Early Career Engagement Committee chairs Carolyn Hettrich and Meghan Bishop along with Jenny Ramion from the AOSSM professional team led the efforts to build an exceptional program for our early career members.

BOLD is a 2-year long program that builds on the lessons learned from the Feagin Leadership Program in partnership with leadership educator Jodi Glickman and her team at Great on the Job. After a competitive selection process, a group of 18 selected playmakers started the program at last year’s annual meeting. Their growth over the past year has been impressive.

A side note: BOLD playmakers are also mentored by senior leaders of AOSSM as part of the Society mentoring program initiated by Mark Miller last year, and coordinated by John Kelly, Keith Kenter, and the Early Career Engagement Committee. I have enjoyed mentoring Adam Tagliero from the Mayo Clinic. I encourage all prospective mentees and mentors to jump on board this awesome opportunity to build impactful relationships. I look forward to next year’s annual meeting in Nashville, where you will get to hear all about the playmakers’ experiences and the results of their impactful team projects.

AOSSM is leading for the future of our society and our members, but also for the future of the entire field. Our expertise in orthopaedic sports medicine is recognized by the subspecialty certification process, also known as SSC, administered by the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery (ABOS). Health care organizations, medical-legal entities, public policy groups, and athletic teams and athletic conferences at all levels are increasingly looking for the SSC in orthopaedic surgeons as a recognition of their expertise.

One of the hurdles to attaining SSC is that the examination cannot be taken until a surgeon completes full orthopaedic board certification—in other words, at least 1 year after passing part 2, the oral ABOS examination, which, for most, is three years after completing an orthopaedic sports medicine fellowship. This isn’t making the “good hard” great; this is ridiculous!

Guess what? We are getting rid of the ridiculous! Your incoming president, Christopher Kaeding, has been working with David Martin, president of ABOS, to create a better path to subspecialty certification. Beginning next year, the SSC examination will be available in July (at the end of the fellowship year). Qualified fellows, or those recently out of fellowship, can take the examination before they take part 2 of the ABOS examination.

Chris and Mark Miller will be revamping our annual board review course so that our members will be prepared for this important step in their sports medicine careers. Chris, this is a wonderful example of your leadership, and your leadership is just what the AOSSM needs for the coming year. Know that we will all be on your team as we continue to lead sports medicine. As I close, will you and Christine please join me and Ann on the stage?

While they are coming to the stage, I’d like to close by saying I am beyond excited about our future: the best is yet to come. It has been the honor of a lifetime to lead sports medicine with all of you. I cannot adequately express in words how deep my gratitude is. I have no words left, so I leave you with a big “thank you” and the Grateful Dead’s “We Bid You Goodnight.”